24 May 2012

Zakka Films: An interview with Seiko Ono

One
of the biggest frustrations of fans of Japanese film is that we hear about a
great documentary playing at international festivals and have to wait years
before it is available on DVD. Even
then, the film is usually only released in Japan and without English subtitles –
thus limiting the audience and making it difficult to use for teaching
purposes.

All
that changed earlier this year when the U.S-based company Zakka Films opened its Filmmakers’ Market with
the aim of offering Japanese and Asian documentary filmmakers the opportunity
to bring subtitled DVDs of their films fresh onto the market for consumption
like fish at Tsukiji.

In
the late 1980s in Japan I started working at Studio 200 of the Seibu Department
Stores. Things were about to decline, but Seibu still had lots of museums,
movie theaters, performance theaters and galleries. Unlike the department
stores in the US, they were trying to provide an entire life to customers: not
just fashionable brands, but the arts as well. Studio 200 was one of the Seibu
art spaces, and was sort of an all-purpose theater playing rare films, presenting
dance performance, experimental music concerts, art exhibitions, etc. People
working there, including me, coordinated many different kinds of events, and I
had some wonderful opportunities to work with films which were not shown at
commercial theaters such as Taiwan New Wave films. It was extremely exciting
for me to work there, and in fact I learned so many things and met a lot of
film people, which helped me later. Just before the 1990s, Seibu’s art spaces
started closing one after another out of financial difficulties. People around
me started leaving because no one wanted to be transferred to the shoe section
or some other section of the Seibu Department Store. In 1990 I joined the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, which was preparing for the second festival
in 1991 (the YIDFF takes place once every two years). After that, for nearly 20
years, my work involved programming and coordinating the YIDFF. I am no longer
officially at the YIDFF, but I am still involved.

Zakka Films seems like a real labour of love. What
inspired you to start the company?

In
2004 my husband got a job at Yale in the US, and all of us moved to America. I
still continued to work for the YIDFF from afar even though I was not a
programmer anymore. I had more spare time to start thinking of doing something
I had never done before, or something that could justify me living here in the
US. Considering my long career at the YIDFF, it didn’t take a long time to get
the idea to sell Japanese documentaries on DVD. I already had connections with
many documentary productions and filmmakers. It was a quite natural idea to start
thinking of working on Japanese documentaries. There were only a few Japanese documentaries
that you could obtain in the US, and the few that existed tended to downplay
the presence of the director, such as with Out
of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said and Radiation: A Slow Death. The first is by Makoto Sato and the second
by Hitomi Kamanaka, and both of them are pretty famous documentary filmmakers,
but their names as directors were sometimes hard to find in publicity. Customers
were not always even aware these were documentaries from Japan. I felt there
was something not quite right with this situation. That was one impetus for
starting Zakka Films. By the way, Zakka Films means 雑貨映画
in Japanese. It is a made up word combination, but zakka in Japanese means miscellaneous goods, so I thought I’d deal
not just with documentaries, but also with other rare films which are powerful
and excite fans of good cinema. As you know, the first DVD of Zakka Films was
The Roots of Japanese Anime, a collection of classic animation, not documentary.
You see I had no experience in running my own business in Japan, and here in
the US I was a non-English speaker, so I thought I should not try something too
difficult at first. Classic animation had a broader appeal and there were
already many fans of Japanese animation. Starting with this, I could learn how
to produce a DVD, how to promote it, and how to sell it.

Although much of pre-war animation has been lost, many
great animated films by Noburo Ofuji and Kenzo Masaoka did survive until the
present day. What criteria did you use in selecting films for
The Roots of Japanese Anime: Until the End of WWII?

If
you want to access classic animation films, the National Museum of Modern Art,
Tokyo, is the best place to visit, but it is almost impossible for us to make a
DVD from their films. Fortunately, there are some classic animation collectors in Japan.
All the films on The Roots of Japanese
Anime were from one collector whom I had known for a long time. At the
beginning of this project, I had a longer list of films to include, but the
process of working on permission and rights issues trimmed it down to eight
films. For me Momotaro’s Sea Eagle (review) was the one which couldn’t be removed, since it was so historically significant.
We also made a booklet that comes with the DVD which includes historical
backgrounds of each film, and out customers have liked that.

Do have any plans to release more anime in the future?

Right
after I released this DVD, I received requests from many customers about what
they want next. Many of them were popular 1970s anime which were made for TV
such as the anime of Fujio Akastuka or Go Nagai. If I won a fortune in a lottery,
I might put out such DVDs, but that is a bit beyond our scale. However, if I
have another chance to work on classic animation again, I would do it.

Zakka Films released four documentaries by legendary
filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto who passed away in 2008. Did Tsuchimoto know
of the plans for their release?

I
wish he had known of this plan. Two years after his death, my husband and I visited
his office, Ciné Associé, a company which was taken over by his wife and
sometimes editor of his later films, Motoko Tsuchimoto. I told her about my
project before the plans were even concrete, and she was very happy to hear of
it, and it was her enthusiasm that helped start the project. Of course I needed
to discuss the project with Siglo, the production company for Minamata: The Victims and Their World (review). Both
of them were so supportive. Motoko-san provided us tapes, documents, books and
whatever was helpful for Zakka.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Tsuchimoto’s
documentaries about Minamata and Hiroshima seem more important than ever –
particularly his focus on the victims of these manmade catastrophes and their
stories. What can today’s documentarians learn from Tsuchimoto?

Tsuchimoto’s
belief was that “If there is no record, there is no truth.” When he started
making documentaries about Minamata, Minamata disease was taboo: no one wanted
to talk about this disease, which is why his first attempt to make a documentary
about Minamata for television totally failed. So what he did was to enter their
world: he and his staff started living there, and volunteered to do things like
drive a car to help them. Minamata was a poor town and cars were still rare.
After building closer relationships with them—a method that wasn’t unusual in
the 1960s given the Sanrizuka series by Ogawa Productions—he and his staff
gradually started shooting. Their office was always open so people from Minamata
could make casual visits and Tsuchimoto could show them the rushes they just
shot. Building trust, people who refused to be filmed at the beginning ended up
turning to ask him to film them! That’s why he could shoot so many of the
victims for Minamata: The Victims and Their World.

This documentary became an important
document in publicizing Minimata disease so they could be officially recognized
as a victims by the government of Japan at that time. Tsuchimoto’s Minamata
series is not just a document, it is a record of human dignity. For cinematic beauty,
I believe some of his films should be ranked among the top films of world
cinema history. You cannot find in his films the terrible images of the victims
that you can find by searching YouTube with the keyword “Minamata.” He
patiently waited until the patients were relaxed and tried to film their most
beautiful expression. I think that’s how he in the end could create works that
made you think deeply about social contradictions. After the Fukushima nuclear accident,
many documentary filmmakers have been to Fukushima or Miyagi to make documentaries.
I think it is fine to have many different styles and methods, and not all of
them need be masterpieces. But I wonder how many filmmakers think like Tsuchimoto
did about how to film such tragedies, and how their work relates to the issues.
The documentaries I like to see are not those that are complete when you’re
finished watching, but those that start then. Tsuchimoto’s films are like that.

On the Road: A Document (1964) is a groundbreaking film
for its experimentation with the form of dramatized documentary. Can you
talk a little bit about why this was such a radical film when it was released
and how it was received by audiences?

This film was
originally made as traffic safety film for the Metropolitan Police, but it was shelved
for nearly 40 years because Tsuchimoto did not make the film that was ordered.
Tsuchimoto was working with the drivers union to expose their problems and
unhealthy labor conditions, while also masterfully editing the footage like a
city symphony, so when a police official finally saw the film, he called it
“useless—the plaything of a cinephile.” Until recently the film was not shown
openly except at some film festivals, so for a long time On the Road was a kind
of phantom film. The production company went bankrupt, so the rights finally reverted
to Noriaki Tsuchimoto himself, and the DVD was released in 2004 in Japan.

The name “Zakka” (miscellaneous goods) suggests that you
plan to expand your catalogue to include more than just classic works of
animation and documentary. What is next for Zakka Films?

I am going to continue working on Tsuchimoto’s works, but
in the spirit of my company’s name, zakka (雑貨),
I would like to extend my business and move beyond the limitations imposed by
our size and finances. The project I just opened is The Filmmakers’ Market (FM). FM is a new
marketplace for documentaries that tries to break down the walls separating
Japanese filmmakers and foreign viewers and allows filmmakers to bring their
English-subtitled works in for direct sale, kind of like a farmer’s fresh
produce market. When I produce and release my own DVDs, there are countless steps
such as making subtitles, designing the DVD cover, making booklets, and so on;
that is a big investment in time and money, so we have to limit ourselves in
what we actually release. But FM is basically Zakka helping independent
filmmakers sell the DVDs they have already made to a foreign market. It opens
up the possibilities to obtain rare documentaries, some of which are not even
commercially released in Japan. We feature not only Japanese but also other
Asian documentaries. All of the DVDs are produced by the directors and
producers themselves; for some, Zakka will help make an English booklet or
cover, but some may have only Japanese on the package or in the booklet (we will
note as such when selling it). But and all of them will have English subtitles.
Please come and look at the films brought to market!

In 2004 the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant was completed in Rokkasho village
as a facility for reprocessing spent fuel from Japan's nuclear reactors
into plutonium. The film spotlights the people of the village, who hold
diverse opinions regarding this huge, nearly operational national project.

ECHOES FROM THE MIIKE Director:
Hiroko Kumagai

The story of the Miike Coal Mine, the largest mine in Japan, which
ceased operations on March 30, 1997. Hiroko Kumagai interviewed over
70 individuals, men and women, including Koreans who were forcibly
brought to Japan. The film looks at Miike not just to explore the past,
but also to think about the future: what it means to work and to
live.

BREAKING THE SILENCE
Director: Toshikuni Doi

In the spring of 2002, the Israeli army surrounded and attacked the
Balata refugee camp. The camera follows residents living in at state of
terror and records their lives and feelings.

ARTISTS OF WONDERLAND
Director: Makoto Sato

This is a film about seven artists. It's also about seven people who
are mentally handicapped. This has all the marks of a Makoto Sato film:
the quirky humor and passion for everyday human life.

BINGAI Director: Feng Yan

Bingai, a Chinese documentary by Feng Yan—a
director deeply inspired by Shinsuke Ogawa—has just been added to the
Filmmakers' Market at Zakka Films. Bingai won the Ogawa Shinsuke
Prize (the grand prize of Asia program) at the Yamagata Film Festival.

MAPPING THE FUTURE NISHINARI Directors: Yukio Tanaka, Tetsuo Yamada

Nishinari in Osaka is home to one of Japan's largest concentrations of day
laborers, with much of the population being composed of homeless persons, buraku
(a discriminated community of descendants of outcast groups), former yakuza,
and Korean-Japanese. This documentary presents the people of Nishinari, not
from on high, but rather from their own level.